For the Union; Ohio Leaders in the Civil War.

by Wheeler, Kenneth W.

• ISBN13: 9780814201299
• ISBN10: 0814201296
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1968-06-01
• Publisher: Ohio State Univ Pr

Summary

How do novels that literally discuss invention and inventors engage through such discussions an array of critically important conversations and issues beyond invention? And to where and how can we trace and follow such discourses? In Where the World Is Not Cultural Authority and Democratic Desire in Modern American Literature. Kim Savelson examines the ways in which resoundingly popular U.S. novels by Frank Norris, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ralph Ellison host the pragmatist tug-of-war between thought and action, between the democratic agenda of the pragmatist movement and the aristocratic idea of aesthetics. Savelson argues for and reads these novels as a way of thinking through the implications for the meaning and making of "culture" brought about by the ongoing social revolution of democratic modernity. She thus expands the scope of the current work being done on pragmatism, as well as the work being done on literature and democracy, carving out an intersection of these two fields.

Author Biography

Kim Savelson teaches at Stanford University in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction Democracy Stumbling: Inventing, Democratic Desire, and the Will to Believe	p. 1
A Plea for Pure Culture: The Pure Science Ideal	p. 23
The Romance of Process: Means Meets Ends in Frank Norris's McTeague	p. 41
"Where the World Is Not": Cultural Interest and Disinterest in Willa Cather's The Professor's House	p. 60
Classes and Masses: Willa Cather's "Purely Cultural Studies" and the "New Commercialism"	p. 77
"Missionaries of Culture": Du Bois' "Higher Aims" in Ellison's Invisible Man	p. 109
Coda	p. 141
Notes	p. 143
Bibliography	p. 181
Index	p. 189
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